Friday, April 22, 2011

In what may be the strongest signal yet of the new pro-labor orientation of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama, the agency filed a complaint Wednesday seeking to force Boeing to bring an airplane production line back to its unionized facilities in Washington State instead of moving the work to a nonunion plant in South Carolina.

In its complaint, the labor board said that Boeing’s decision to transfer a second production line for its new 787 Dreamliner passenger plane to South Carolina was motivated by an unlawful desire to retaliate against union workers for their past strikes in Washington and to discourage future strikes. The agency’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, said it was illegal for companies to take actions in retaliation against workers for exercising the right to strike.

Although manufacturers have long moved plants to nonunion states, the board noted that Boeing officials had, in internal documents and news interviews, specifically cited the strikes and potential future strikes as a reason for their 2009 decision to expand in South Carolina.

Boeing said it would “vigorously contest” the labor board’s complaint. “This claim is legally frivolous and represents a radical departure from both N.L.R.B. and Supreme Court precedent,” said J. Michael Luttig, a Boeing executive vice president and its general counsel. “Boeing has every right under both federal law and its collective bargaining agreement to build additional U.S. production capacity outside of the Puget Sound region.”

It is highly unusual for the federal government to seek to reverse a corporate decision as important as the location of plant.

But ever since a Democratic majority took control of the five-member board after Mr. Obama’s election, the board has signaled that it would seek to adopt a more liberal, pro-union tilt after years of pro-employer decisions under President Bush. . . .

This is such a vast overreach by Labor and its cronies in the Obama administration - it is such a fundamental attack on capitalism - it is difficult to know where to begin. As a threshold matter, the anti-retaliation provisions of the NLRA protect individuals from being fired or demoted for their union activities. The Obama radicals on the NLRB now seek to vastly expand the scope of those provisions to a point that corporations would become captives of unionized, closed shop states.

Unions are an anachronism of the communist movement near two centuries old - which itself was a response to inequities that arose early in the Industrial Age, something that has long been consigned to the history books. There is a reason unions are drastically declining in the private sector in the U.S.. They do not make economic sense in an age of vast national wealth where competition for labor and the mobility of labor insures that laborers will be able to receive fair market value.

It is beyond any form of contention that, where unions exist, the end product is at best, substantially more expensive than that produced by non-union labor, such as with automakers, or in the worst case, substantially lessens the quality of the service being delivered, as is the case with teachers unions and public education. Further, the reality is that in "closed shop" states, unions create a form of indentured servitude, where to even work in a desired field, a laborer must pay a union for the privilege. The laborer then has no say in how the union uses those dues. Whatever justification for unions existed in 1848, when Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, described unions as the building blocks of his Communist utopia, those justifications do not exist in America today.

The only thing that can possibly save private sector unions in the U.S. is the point of the gun by the government. And indeed, that is what we are seeing today with Obama's NLRB outrageously trying to use the police power of our government to force Boeing to keep all production in Washington.

The only reason unions still exist in America, both public sector and private sector, is that they are economic base of the Democratic party. It is hard to think of a more corrupt or malign situation. When the administrations change in 2012, it is time to go to war on unions - outlawing public sector unions and changing the rules for private sector unions. No place in America should be subject to a "closed shop," the U.S. government should never favor unions in its contracting, and the NLRB should be disbanded.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Obama is finally figuring out that the November 2010 elections meant something. Americans can see the direction of our country - and its running fast and furious towards an economic cliff. Obama tried ignoring it with his 2011 Budget and insane SOTU speech. In stark contrast, Rep. Paul Ryan recently released a budget proposal to deal honestly with our problems. Obama tried to respond today - with a speech of course, not a serious budget proposal. Here is the summary of that speech:

The debt and deficit is Bush's fault. Republican's budget plan is "E"-vil. It will destroy our nation's infrastructure, toss grandmothers into the street, take away their health care, and take candy from babies. WE (the royal "we") will bring fiscal sanity to America by gutting our military and raising taxes on the rich and corporations. WE will also increase spending and leave untouched all benefits for social security and medicare. All of this will magically reduce the deficit by trillions.

Add a ton of intellectually dishonest demagoguery and announce a new panel with Joe the Clown in charge and that is it a nutshell. Obama is more dangerously incompetent than Homer Simpson working at a nuke plant.

Update: Krauthammer offers his take on the scurrilous performance by Obama:

Jake Tapper at Political Punch notes this contrast in intellectual honesty from one of Obama's prior speeches to today's:

President Obama at the GOP House retreat, January 2010:

“We're not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterize whatever proposals are put out there as, ‘Well, you know, that's -- the other party's being irresponsible. The other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens. That the other party is doing X, Y, Z.”

President Obama today:

“One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates…This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”

One word that will never be appended to Obama when history is written is "leadership." My only question is whether we will still be able to fix our country post 2012, or whether Obama and the left have set us on a permanent progressive course to ruin.

“When the President reached out to ask us to attend his speech, we were expecting an olive branch. Instead, his speech was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our fiscal crisis. What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander-in-chief; we heard a political broadside from our campaigner-in-chief.

“Last year, in the absence of a serious budget, the President created a Fiscal Commission. He then ignored its recommendations and omitted any of its major proposals from his budget, and now he wants to delegate leadership to yet another commission to solve a problem he refuses to confront.

“We need leadership, not a doubling down on the politics of the past. By failing to seriously confront the most predictable economic crisis in our history, this President’s policies are committing our children to a diminished future. We are looking for bipartisan solutions, not partisan rhetoric. When the President is ready to get serious about confronting this challenge, we'll be here.”

Update: Ryan's office highlights "key facts" from Obama's speech:

· Counts unspecified savings over 12 years, not the 10-year window by which serious budget proposals are evaluated.

· Postpones all savings until 2013 – after his reelection campaign.

· Runs away from the Fiscal Commission’s recommendations on Social Security – puts forward no specific ideas or even a process to force action.